10 April 2013

The Death of Margaret Thatcher – Reflections by Danny Morrison

Rosaleen Sands appeared on television at Long Kesh and prayed for her son, Bobby. She asked Margaret Thatcher to compromise and resolve the hunger strike. We all know how Thatcher answered.

Tuesday 9 April 2013

WHEN Mark
Thatcher went missing in the Sahara while taking part in an international motor
race in January 1982, his ashen-faced mother, upset and distressed, appeared on
television close to breaking down. She prayed to God that Mark wouldn’t die,
that he would be rescued.

Six months
earlier, Rosaleen Sands appeared on television, interviewed in the car park of
Long Kesh, and prayed for her son, Bobby, and asked Margaret Thatcher to
compromise and resolve the hunger strike. We all know how Thatcher answered,
and the mountain of suffering that nationalists in the North experienced under
her premiership.

Ironically,
this is the day, 32 years ago, that Bobby Sands was elected MP for Fermanagh
and South Tyrone. Thatcher’s mantra to republicans before that was: “‘How can I
talk to you, you don’t have a mandate.” But when Bobby got elected (with almost
10,000 more votes than Thatcher got in her constituency!), the British Prime
Minister rushed through an amendment to the Representation of the People Act to
prevent any other prisoner being elected in his place.

When Gerry
Adams, Martin McGuinness, and I were elected to the Assembly in 1982, Thatcher
issued exclusion orders against us, banning us from entering Britain on pain of
a five-year prison sentence. My ban lasted 13 years. In 1988, she introduced
the Broadcasting Act banning Sinn Féin elected representatives from being
interviewed on radio and television. Yes, she was the ‘Queen of Democracy’ for
sure.

I remember
the 10 men who died on hunger strike but also women and children her forces
killed with impunity and immunity, people like:-

• 14-year-old
Julie Livingstone, shot dead by the British Army the day Francis Hughes died in
jail;

• 11-year-old
Carol Ann Kelly, shot dead a week later while getting milk for a neighbour;

• And on the
morning of Joe McDonnell’s death in jail, my childhood friend, Nora McCabe, a
mother of three, shot dead seconds after going to buy a packet of cigarettes to
calm her nerves.

These are
just some of the names. The list runs to hundreds when we add to it those
killed by loyalist groups that were rearmed and reorganised by British Military
Intelligence, which reported to Prime Minister Thatcher until her resignation.

Thatcher
sanctioned the use of supergrass trials which completely undermined the justice
system. She authorised the shoot-to-kill policy and her colleagues subsequently
undermined the attempt by Deputy Chief Constable John Stalker to get to the
truth. She authorised the attacks on republican funerals and created an
atmosphere of hatred and bitterness which ultimately led to the attempt on her
life by the IRA in the Brighton bombing in 1984.

Of course,
she also destroyed proud working-class communities in Britain with her social
and economic policies. And over lunch one Sunday she ordered the sinking of the
Argentinian vessel Belgrano during
the Malvinas/Falklands War even though it was outside the 200-mile exclusion
zone and was sailing away from the area of conflict. More than 323 sailors
died, many of them teenage cadets.

When Carol
Thatcher, Margaret’s journalist daughter, travelled to the Malvinas/Falklands
and Argentina to make a documentary on the 25th anniversary, one woman whose
son died on the Belgrano said to her: “I never saw him again because your
mother killed him.”

In 1986, she
and US President Ronald Reagan ordered the bombing of Libya, which took the
lives of over 130 civilians.

Some have
argued that Thatcher stood up to the unionists when she signed the Anglo-Irish
Agreement in November 1985 and should be given credit. But her motives were
two-fold: she expected extradition to be made easier and increased security
collaboration in the fight against republicanism. She was, indeed, also responding
to the warnings from then Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald that something needed to
be done to halt the electoral rise of Sinn Féin.

In reality,
it was the suffering and determination of the Northern nationalist community
which forced change.

When
Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979 we know that on her desk was a secret
assessment of the IRA by the British Army’s Brigadier James Glover, commander
of land forces in the North. He said the IRA would continue with its war until
there was an acceptable political settlement.

He rejected
the official propaganda line which was the basis for the treatment of the men
in the H-Blocks and the women in Armagh Jail. He said that IRA Volunteers were
not criminals but were talented and dedicated.

Thatcher put
my community through hell and her policies unnecessarily protracted the
conflict. When it came to a political agreement on Good Friday 1998, the
prisoners in the H-Blocks were given early release (an ‘amnesty’) which was
recognition that the British knew they were political prisoners all along.

I was in
jail (again as a result of her dirty war and use of agents provocateurs) when
she resigned in 1990. One newspaper told this story:

“‘The bad news,’ said a voice over
the public-address system in a north London railway station, ‘is that a signal
failure means another delay. The good news is that Thatcher’s resigned! Hip,
Hip, Hooray!’ Most of the commuters cheered.”

I once might
have cheered her passing. But now I am indifferent — though I will never forget
what she did, and all those who died on her watch.